I think the primary mistake here is assuming that Nokia, from the outset, was intending to push into the realm of the iPhone with the N900. They pulled directly from their internet tablet line, and -still- hold the N97 as their flagship device, which does have reliable access to the Ovi store along with all of their other phones. Also, a huge part of the developmental frameworks as they exist in Maemo 5 are open source, so Nokia can only apply so much pressure here. In a sense this is why they're moving to Qt, so that they can give you the static, unchanging API you need for closed applications. I'd say that their strategy was to step Maemo from WiFi only to WiFi + GSM data network. Then it was strangely successful and attracted people who didn't look at where it came from, only at what others were doing, thinking Nokia was intent on doing the same. What do you consider "proper development?" To be totally fair, the Application Manager is effecively just a front end for apt and dpkg. It's not designed to do any of that. I think there's a large number of people who came thinking that Maemo was just like Android, built from the ground up to be a Phone OS with an App Store ready to go just like them, then don't bother to look at where it came from and the community that was already here.